Isayev and Aliyev work the controls of the aircraft furiously coaxing every bit of power they can from the leaking engine as they fight against the storm. They hold their own for another two minutes, enough to bring them closer to the edge of the clouds, when the final engine coughs and sputters. Aliyev glances out the window at the engine and shouts at Isayev.
“We have to go! Altitude is dropping fast!”
Isayev is about to answer when a blinding light fills the cabin. He throws his hands up in front of his face until his eyes adjust to the sunlight. From outside, the plane looks like some sort of dying monster as it bursts forth from the storm, ribbons of cloud rippling off the tips of the wings. “Go! Go!” Isayev shouts at Aliyev and reaches beneath the controls, pulling a lever to lock them in place. With the worst of the storm behind them the plane can glide for a fair distance, enough to put it several miles or more away from where the four men will land.
Once the plane is set Isayev climbs out of his chair and into the back compartment where Aliyev and the two technicians are waiting. Aliyev raises his thumb into the air and the gesture is returned by Isayev. Aliyev turns, pulls the emergency lever on the door and it falls off the plane, spinning violently as it disappears behind them. Aliyev walks up to the door, braces his arms against his chest and steps out without hesitation, disappearing for a few seconds only to show up again once his parachute deploys.
Belov and Yermakov stand at the edge of the door, neither of them wanting to be the first out when Isayev walks up behind them, braces himself with two leather straps and kicks them out through the door one after the other. He shouts at them as they go, reminding them to pull their cords and sure enough he sees two more parachutes open up. With one final look around the cabin Isayev straps himself to a large canvas bag filled with supplies and pushes it out the door as he jumps into the unknown.
The Bear flies for nearly fifteen more miles, its fourth engine occasionally sputtering back to life along the way, but it eventually crashes on the far western side of the capital, far from where its four temporary inhabitants eventually land. The eyes that see the plane crash are few and far between and the mission, as far as the two Spetsnaz officers can determine, is still successful. Whether it will remain so is anyone’s guess.
Chapter 14
Blacksburg, VA
What on earth is that smell? Dianne wrinkled her nose as she ascended to the second floor of the building. When she had first walked in she had dismi
ssed the faint foul odor as coming from rotten food in the café, but the deeper she walked into the second floor’s hallways the stronger it became. Without the benefit of direct sunlight to penetrate into the inner halls, Dianne was finally forced to switch on her flashlight. She scanned back and forth with it, looking down the hall and at the rooms around her before panning down to the carpet. She held the beam on the carpet for a second before kneeling down to get a closer look at it. What on earth…
The carpet was dark grey in color but it looked like there was a pattern on some parts of it that made no sense. When she walked on the pattern the carpet felt different, like it was stiffer than the parts that were plain grey. Dianne swallowed hard, fighting back against the rising bile in her throat as the smell continued to grow stronger with each step she took down the hall. Finally, as she reached a large open area where the main nurses station was located, she realized that the smell wasn’t coming from rotten food. “Dear sweet merciful…” Dianne’s eyes opened wide and she pressed her arm up against her face, swallowing the saliva that felt like it was pouring into her mouth.
When she was in college all those years ago her roommate had been a fan of horror movies. She was a particular fan of horror movies that relied on gore and on-screen violence to induce fear in movie-goers. While Dianne had never been a fan of such films she had agreed to watch a movie simply titled The One with her roommate late one October evening. The first twenty minutes of the movie were tense, but bearable. The remainder of the movie left Dianne with nightmares for days on end and cemented in her mind the fact that she was not a fan of the gory horror movie genre.
As Dianne’s eyes flicked across the scene laid out in front of her she couldn’t help but think back to that night with her roommate and the nightmares that had followed. The same surreal, visceral fear gripped her stomach, twisting it into knots and sending more bile rising up her throat. Her brain felt like it was short-circuiting, simultaneously telling her to run and fight and hide all at the same time. Her limbs felt frozen as she stepped back, nearly falling over as she reached out and grabbed the wall for support.
“What… what happened here?” Dianne whispered to herself, scarcely able to believe her eyes. The bodies of at least four individuals were strewn across the floor in front of the nurses station, the smell from their rotting flesh stinging Dianne’s eyes and the back of her throat. Two appeared to be wearing nurse uniforms while one lying on his back near an overturned wheelchair looked like he was a patient. A fourth body wearing a police uniform was across the room near a wall with a pistol on the ground nearby.
The grey flooring was soaked through with blood and other bodily fluids that had leaked from the corpses and soaked into the carpet. Dianne slowly realized that the fluid mixture must have been causing the stains she had seen elsewhere on the carpet in the hallway, though she hadn’t seen any bodies lying in the hall.
After dry heaving for a moment and taking a long drink of water to try and wash down the bile Dianne pulled her shirt up over her mouth and nose and stepped gingerly through the carnage. She saw two more bodies behind the nurses station, both with bandannas over their faces and white undershirts that had been stained with blood. One of the figures was on his face while the other was on his back, the handle of a pistol-grip shotgun still in his hand.
The more Dianne saw of the bodies and how they were laid out, the more she began to ignore the smell and gore and focus on deducing what had happened. At first she thought that it was a simple robbery gone wrong, but after stepping behind the nurses station and picking up a logbook she found on the desk, she saw that the situation was far more complicated—and horrifying—than she first imagined. Someone—one of the nurses or doctors from the looks of it—had kept a record of what had happened on the day of the event and for the four days following.
***
- Something happened earlier. Giant explosions in the parking lot and in the streets. Almost everyone’s car went up in flames. Dr. Landrum and a couple of the nurses from upstairs left, said they needed to walk home to their families. The Internet’s down, phones aren’t working and the TV just cut out. What’s going on??
- A couple of people showed up to pick up their relatives. They were armed and didn’t want to answer any questions. Another one showed up after that, said The BBQ place down the street’s up in flames. A couple of the apartment towers downtown are smoking pretty badly. Saw a plane going down near the airport, hard. We’re all talking about leaving but there are too many people here.
- The fires are unbelievable. We seem to be safe for the moment, but it’s like hell on earth out there. Emergency generator’s half out of fuel, or that’s what the pair who went to check on it said. Couple of cops showed up earlier in a beat-up cruiser. One of them was hurt pretty bad from a gunshot to his gut. His partner told us it’s anarchy in the streets. All the doors are locked and we’ve consolidated the patients to this floor so we’re okay for now.
- Fires are dying down but there’s still a bunch of smoke and ash in the air. Generator went down in the middle of the night and we lost six. The police officer’s partner was one of them. There’s no power for the refrigeration units so not sure what to do.
- Another five went last night. We’re running out of what we need to keep them alive. Two more cops showed up, armed to the teeth. Rough shape. Said looters are running rampant.
- Saw an ambulance out in the street, lights flashing. It stopped and a few people got out and started running up. Cops met them at the door and one of them went down. They killed a few of the people but there are more coming.
- Why oh why no no no more dying, lots of gunshots
- Holed up upstairs but they’re down a floor below. They want drugs and we’re mostly out. Only a few bags left but they’re not happy with that. They’re shooting patients trying to make us give them what we don’t have. One officer alive. He’s going to try something he said is crazy and stupid. I hope we make it out.
***
The rest of the pages were illegible, a mixture of scrawled and smeared pen along with droplets of dried blood. Dianne closed the book and looked at the bodies on the floor. “So they were trapped here, trying to take care of the patients when you idiots arrived and started shooting the place up so that you could get high?” She shook her head. “I wonder if there’s anyone still alive here?”
She hurried away from the nurses station and stopped at the first room down the hall. She opened it slowly, keeping her gun at the ready, when she was nearly bowled over by more foul odors than she had already experienced. Already overwhelmed by the sight and smells outside the nurses station she barely managed to pull down her shirt off of her face before vomiting onto the floor. Dianne wiped her mouth on the sleeve of her jacket and took a hasty drink of water before looking for the source of the fresh odor.
Inside the room, lying on the two beds that were sitting next to each other, were the bodies of a man and woman that had been dead for more than a few days. They were dressed in plain off-white clothes that had the appearance of being standard issue for patients in the facility. Dianne realized with no small amount of horror that the patients must have died after the event, either from lack of medication or food, from injuries inflicted by the looters or something even worse.